The Voice Mate: An Aural Organizer that Really Works

From the Editor: Curtis Chong directs the NFB's Technology Department at the
National Center for the Blind. This is what he has to say about a new pocket
organizer that the NFB is now selling.

A couple of years ago the Parrot Company in Paris, France, released the Parrot
Plus voice recognition organizer. Although the Parrot Plus was not originally
designed for use by the blind, it proved to have a unique appeal, which resulted
in newer versions containing improvements suggested by a growing number of blind
users.

Perhaps the most significant problem with the Parrot Plus was its small storage
capacity. In its normal recording mode the Parrot Plus held up to six-and-a-half
minutes of recorded information; in its compressed mode (the results of which
are extremely difficult to understand), it held up to thirteen minutes of recorded
information. For any active user this was simply not enough.

The Voice Mate, announced by the Parrot Company in November, 1999, is the next
generation of the Parrot Plus. Physically it very much resembles the Parrot
Plus in that it is about the size of a television remote control. It fits comfortably
into a suit pocket, and you can get a leather carrying case for it. It is powered
by four standard AAA batteries which, according to previous experience with
the Parrot Plus, should last for a few months. Two major improvements over the
Parrot Plus are forty minutes of recording time and non-volatile flash memory,
which allows the batteries to be replaced without losing data. Earphones are
supplied for private listening.

The Voice Mate has five major utilities: a talking phone book, a voice note
pad, an appointment book, a talking alarm clock, and a talking calculator. Every
one of these utilities is completely accessible nonvisually--in other words,
the Voice Mate talks to you right out of the box.

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The Talking Phone Book

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This utility is used to store information about people with whom you communicate.
In its basic form the talking phone book stores a person's name (as spoken by
you) and telephone number, which you enter through the Voice Mate keypad. You
can locate individual entries in the phone book by either speaking the name
of the person you are looking for or moving quickly through the entries with
arrow keys supplied for the purpose. Once you have found the desired name, you
can instruct the Voice Mate to generate the tones that allow the number to be
dialed using a touch-tone telephone. Alternatively, the Voice Mate will speak
the digits of the person's phone number. If you like, you can save up to five
phone numbers for any given person and also aurally record the address.

We found that the voice-recognition technology in the talking phone book worked
quite well. We experienced a success rate very close to 100% when trying to
locate entries using voice identifiers. Moreover, we were pleased to note that,
once a given entry had been recorded, it was possible to add or modify any part
of the information.

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The Voice Note Pad

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With this utility you can record aural messages in the Voice Mate. Each message
is numbered and stored with the time and date it was recorded. When replaying
messages, you can choose whether or not to hear this information. The Voice
Mate provides a rich set of editing functions for individual messages; you can
insert more information, remove some information, or overlay the remainder of
the message with new information.

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The Appointment Book

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This utility lets you record a message about an event which you know will take
place at a specific date and time. The Voice Mate can then be instructed to
trigger a notification beep at the date and time of the event. If the event
is likely to occur more than once--as in a birthday or weekly meeting--the Voice
Mate can be set to trigger a reminder beep. For example, you can instruct the
Voice Mate to trigger a notification beep at 10:00 a.m. on July 5 of the year
2000 to tell you that the first general session of the convention of the National
Federation of the Blind is about to start. You can instruct the Voice Mate to
trigger an alarm at 7:30 a.m. every day to remind you that you'd better be in
your office. Or you can set up a reminder that will go off on April 1 of every
year to tell you that "Today is April Fool's Day." Whether a notification
beep or a reminder, the Voice Mate will trigger the alarm even if you have turned
it completely off.

Another handy feature is the ability to associate aural key words with an event.
You can enter a birthday, for example, and record a key word like "Mom's
birthday." Then to locate Mom's birthday, you press a key and say "Mom's
birthday." The Voice Mate finds the appropriate entry in the appointment
book.

Last but not least, there is the ability to look at your appointment schedule
for a specific date. This is handy if you want to avoid double-booking meetings.

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The Talking Alarm Clock

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The Voice Mate's talking alarm clock is fairly straightforward. This is where
you set the current date and time. The alarm has its own independent volume
control. You can set the clock to run using standard a.m.-p.m. notification
or a twenty-four-hour mode (military time). The date can be entered in either
European or American format.

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The Talking Calculator

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This is a calculator which can perform the four basic arithmetic operations
of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Up to twelve digits
can be displayed. In addition to the four basic functions, the Voice Mate also
has a percent feature, the ability to store and retrieve a single number from
memory, and a European currency conversion function. You can set the calculator
to display from 2 to 8 decimal places. When the display is read, numbers are
pronounced in full words (e.g., 123 would be pronounced "one hundred and
twenty-three").

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Documentation

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The Voice Mate comes with a printed manual and a tutorial on audiocassette.
The tutorial is enough to get you started, but its description of some of the
calculator functions leaves a lot to the user's imagination. If you are familiar
with the operation of the Parrot Plus, be advised that the Voice Mate is sufficiently
different that you will feel the need to listen to the taped tutorial at least
once. Large print and Braille manuals are said to be available, but we have
not had an opportunity to examine them.

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Areas for Improvement

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In some of the utilities (e.g., the talking alarm clock and the phone book),
there is no way to correct an error you have entered on the keypad. It is necessary
to enter the data incorrectly first and then take steps to correct the information.
It would be nice to have a "clear current entry" or a "backspace"
function which works the same way for all of the utilities.

It is cumbersome to use the Voice Mate as a talking clock. You have to enter
multiple commands to learn what time it is. Also, when you ask the Voice Mate
to speak the time, you hear the current date and, if it is on, the time of the
alarm. It would be nice to have a simple-to-activate function which would speak
only the time.

The setting in the talking calculator which controls how many decimal positions
are displayed is referred to as "digits after comma." This is confusing
to someone who hasn't listened to the tutorial tape or read the manual. This
should be corrected to say "digits after decimal point."

Finally, in the voice note pad, while you can insert new information into a
message that you have already recorded, you cannot pause the recording of a
message that you are composing for the first time. There should be a pause function
in the recording mode similar to the pause function available when playing back
messages in the note pad.

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Conclusion

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The Voice Mate is truly an aural organizer that a blind person can use. Its
compact design, long battery life, and diverse functionality make it extremely
useful for the person on the go who needs to do a lot of things out of the office,
while at the same time keeping track of the many meetings and events which are
an inevitable part of one's working life.

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Availability

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The Voice Mate is now available through the Materials Center of the National
Federation of the Blind. It is priced at $300. Telephone (410) 659-9314. Calls
to the Materials Center are accepted from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., eastern time.